Texas Tech announces plans for veterinary school in Amarillo

Veterinarian Dr. David Faulkner sees several pets a day.

Faulkner said a helping hand, however, is a little bit harder to come across in the area.

"It's just hard to attract vet students to the area," Faulkner said.

With only one veterinarian school in the Lone Star state, Texas Tech University of Health Sciences officials said students are leaving the state to study.

"A lot of Oklahoma State's applicants for their vet school are from Texas because we don't have the resources here," TTUHSC President Tedd Mitchell said.

On Tuesday, Texas Tech University officials announced their plan to fix that problem by developing a veterinary School in Amarillo.

"I think when you look at this area piece of what we do in the industry is a veterinarian school," Dean of the College of Agricultural Sciences & Natural Resources Dr. Michael Galyean said.

University officials said there's not only a massive demand for the program, but also an extreme need in the area.

"We have a large animal population and few animal veterinarians so we think a reasonable approach is food animal production as a key point of what this school will do to serve our community," Galyean said.

"When it comes to insuring not only safety of food safety and food security, one of the issues that come to play is the health of the animal itself," Cactus Feeders' Dr. Michael Engler said.

With Texas being the nation's leader of the billion dollar cattle industry, officials said having a vet school will help the area and possibly bring in major agriculture companies.

"From an economic development stand point, putting it in this location would be a big draw to a lot of animal health in corporate level type of activity level," Galyean said.

TTUHSC officials said there's still a long road ahead of them. They still need to request legislative appropriation for 2017 as well as help from donors.